Audrey Macklin: What’s So Special About Private Refugee Sponsorship in Canada?

The uniqueness of Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program has attracted global interest in the last few years. While speaking at the University of New South Wales, 2017 Foundation fellow Audrey Macklin presented lessons other countries could learn from the program while “[dispelling] the romanticism” all too often associated with Canadian policies. Noting that global resettlement numbers relative to migration flows remain trivial, Macklin focused on the program’s impact on the Canadian sponsors themselves. Macklin’s remarks – broadcast on ABC’s Big Ideas program (the Australian equivalent of CBC Ideas) – demonstrated how sponsoring refugees redefines the boundaries of citizenship and transforms the “national narrative.” At the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, Macklin’s fellowship project aims to create knowledge about private refugee sponsors in the Western world.

Audrey Macklin is a 2017 Foundation fellow, as well as the director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and the chair in Human Rights Law at the Faculty of Law, and teaches at the School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Toronto. Listen to the program here.